August 16th, 1977. I delivered an afternoon newspaper (remember them?) that is as dead as Elvis, John and Jerry; The Philadelphia Bulletin. I had cousins from Anaheim in town and it was a rainy day so went to a movie. I was the oldest kid in the group as a mature 12 year old therefore the cinematic classic we saw that day was Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo. I seem to recall it sucked. Afterward mom took us all to pick up my newspapers and she drove us from house to house in the rain. I think she was being nice because of my cousins. Her usual response to a request for help on a rainy day was "your not made of sugar, you won't melt so get out there and do your job." I use that line all the time. thanks mom.

The 'made of sugar' line has some currency this side of the pond too - at least I use it a lot. I'm not certain where I first heard it but I'm pretty sure it accompanied me from fair Caledonia.

And speaking of not being certain of things - I have no idea at all where I was on any event of world importance you might care to mention. Not a clue. The older I get the more distrustful I am of distant memories - I'm convinced that what you're eventually doing is remembering the memory of the event and not the actual event itself, which becomes more and more obscured behind increasingly flawed layers of recollection as time goes by.

btw i am beginning to take this London stuff personal. Last time they rioted while i was there, this time they started 3 weeks before i even arrive. You have some pull over there right? Do you think you try to get them to calm down just a bit? thanks.

They do say that people's memories for these things are far less accurate than we think (they've done studies ... you know, the famous "they").

I think there was a study of people's memories (Americans) of where they were when they heard about the Challenger space shuttle disaster. I'm always interested in that one because I am quite sure I remember exactly where I was, who came into the room and what they said etc. But apparently when they interviewed the same people at several-years-apart intervals, the story people tell changes quite dramatically. So I wonder if I really do remember or if I've made up a story to tell myself. Much of memory is making up stories to tell ourselves ...Interesting ...

I remember exactly where I was when I learned the news re 9-11, when Lennon was shot, when the Challenger exploded, and when Phil hit the opening notes for Dark Star at the Greek. I also know where I was when JFK was shot, but don't recall anything about that. For Jerry, I know what I did that night and how it ended - went to a rave in an anarchist squat on outskirts of Prague, drink lots of red wine, dropped, and walked across Charles Bridge with sunrise while Highway 61 played on my walkman. Don't know who told me or how I learned but the walk across that bridge is etched deep.

Funny because with Jerry (at a scientific meeting in NH) and Elvis (see above) i was doing something fairly unique so it easy for me to remember those because there were other things going on. The John Lennon one, i remember watching MNF but could not remember specifics and the Challenger was also a fairly normal day for me, i was in college going to class. I don't recall when i heard, but after it happened i remember going to an analytical chemistry class and the professor wheeling a TV in to watch as she realized that class would be meaningless that afternoon. So that unique aspect of the day i remember vividly. This makes me think that part of my memory is related to the unique surroundings and i really don't have to embellish the memory but without those events, i might not be able to remember as clearly.

If I'm recalling the study correctly (ha!), what happens is sort of like the game "telephone," where a message getting passed along slowly morphs into something very different from its original, but so slowly and in such small bits that it's not noticeable along the way.

So that there's probably some piece of your memory about the classroom and the teacher wheeling in a TV, etc., that is accurate, but you might be surprised - if it were really possible to know the "truth" - at the details that have changed in your mind. For instance, you were probably in class but it was not the class you remember. etc.

Most of us in the US certainly remember where we were on 9/11, but certain details, no matter how vivid they seem, would probably turn out to be wrong. I was at home, having just taken my son to school, and I remember I was on the phone on a work related conversation and straining to get the gist of some wild story I was hearing on the radio, something about a plane and the World Trade Center? and the two of us on the phone kept trying to get the conversation back on track and finally she burst out, "Do you have the TV on?" and I said "I have the radio on" and we both agreed we needed to get off the phone! I called my husband and said that two planes had hit the WTC and he said, "Dan Rather says that's not true." And I said, "Then Dan Rather needs to turn on the television, 'cus I saw the second plane hit."

I should ask both my husband and my colleague if they remember it that way!

I wonder if it's related to how many times we tell a story. For instance, Reagan's shooting: I was at work (waitress job at a hippie-ish place), someone came in and told about it, folks started joking about it, and I felt pissed cuz, sheesh, I didn't like his politics but he'd just been SHOT.

OK, haven't told that story much, so I'm guessing it's pretty accurate. But my Earliest Memory in Life ... I've told that a lot, asked others for theirs, and I've often thought that what I remember now is the picture I get in my head of my earliest memory, and not the memory itself anymore. I think the more you repeat a memory, the more you revisualize the memory itself, and after a while you're remembering your revisualized picture.

Or sometimes you can just be wrong. Case in point: For years I remembered going to Gettysburg as a kid with my family. I found out a few years ago we NEVER WENT TO GETTYSBURG. Holy heck. I think what I remember was part of a school field trip to DC that must have included Gettysburg. But the details sure did change.

There's a researcher (Elizabeth Loftus) famous for a study called "lost in the mall," in which they basically implanted false memories in subjects - convinced them that they had, as a small child, been lost at the mall one day. (The subjects' mothers were complicit with the researchers, in other words.) It was very easy to get people to believe it even though it never happened at all, particularly if the story included vivid details, like what color shirt you were wearing that day etc. The people who publicized supposed "recovered memories" of sexual abuse hate her, because she says sometimes therapists actually implanted these memories in patients - not deliberately, of course. I'm sure for most of us, a lot of childhood memories are really memories of things we've been told we did, rather than things we actually did.

I remember Reagan's shooting vividly because I was in France, I was watching TV (I was an au pair) and I didn't get what they were saying. In 1981, it was several hours before they had the video footage from across the Atlantic, so the coverage was very different from what it would have been at home. So it was just talking heads, and they kept flashing the word "Attentat" on the screen, and I would hear the name "Ronald Reagan" and I knew the story must be something big, and I kept idly wondering what "Attentat" meant. Suddenly it came to me that an "attentat" was an assassination attempt! Then it took me hours to figure out if he was dead or alive. (I was watching kids and no one else was home for hours.)

It also depends how often u play it back, and how simple it is...for me, I can recall details of each first capture of many species, in part cause I wrote it down, then, and relived it many times since...u guessed I am that kind of person, right? There isn't a person I've met that doesn't end up saying 'jeeezzz, Tell's memory is unreal' cause I spend so much brain time on replay...OCD, of course, not bragging.